


Falling Into Blue Space

by Alessariel



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Angst, Kaidan's perspective, Lots of Angst, M/M, Slight Canon Divergence, Spoilers for Mass Effect 2, Spoilers for Mass Effect 3, also angst, but it ends on a hopeful note, just saying ...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-01
Updated: 2013-11-01
Packaged: 2017-12-31 05:14:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1027647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alessariel/pseuds/Alessariel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Viewed through a mass effect field, space resembles a particular kind of blue. The same colour as Shepard's eyes.<br/>Shepard is falling, Kaidan is forced to watch (mainly by the author).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Falling Into Blue Space

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a chat with Kaylizle of Tumblr. My first finished fanfic in more than five years. I hadn't realized how much I needed to write this.

It happens while Kaidan is reading an article on his omni-tool. It's about Commander Shepard, saviour of the citadel. Personally, he despises the honorific. As if Shepard was defined by a single deed. At least they spared Kaidan a title. He's not sure he could have lived with 'Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko, biotic sidekick of the saviour of the citadel'. Nevertheless, he's set his omni-tool up so that it alerts him anytime someone posts something on the topic. He tells himself that this is not obsessive at all but perfectly normal. Everyone wants a piece of Shepard these days.

Everyone, even previously unknown alien ships.

Red alert, and all hands are on deck. Everyone is focused. They're the crew of the legendary Normandy - of course everyone is focused. But other than Joker, there's not much anyone of them can do as the unidentified ship closes in. 

Evasive manoeuvres. Their cannon cuts across the strange rockshaped hull harmlessly, almost like a caress. Garrus screams in frustration.

The whole ship shudders and they all feel it in their bones, as if they'd just taken a direct hit themselves, they love this ship so much. While everyone is still in shock, disbelief prominent - they are the Normandy, the Normandy always wins her fights, always - Shepard is already ordering people to the escape pods, voice calm but authoritarian. Kaidan does his best to help. Drags one wounded crewmember to the pod, then comes back for that guy from engineering who got all the applause on the last Normandy talent show for his acrobatics.

The Normandy shudders again and screams like a wounded angel as the attacker's beam cuts through her. Flashing red lights, and fire and smoke everywhere. Parts of the ship are open to the void. A nameless bluish planet hangs below them, frozen and beautiful, lifeless, like the bodies of the crew members that float in their restraints as artificial gravity dies soon after them. Pressly's eyes are vacant, he looks peaceful as if he was merely sleeping underneath the heavy steel beam.

Kaidan kneels at the side of a young woman, he thinks she's that girl from the second to last station in the CIC. He can't for the life of him remember her name. This seems significant somehow, seems like a failure. She's dead.

A heavy hand on his shoulder, he turns to see Shepard, with those serious eyes the colour of space, "There's nothing you can do for her! Get to the pods! Go!". He nods assent, rises, expecting Shepard to follow. 

Frantic comm-chatter in both their helmets. Joker is still on the bridge, refusing to leave. Shepard knows it too, turns towards the bridge while simultaneously shoving Kaidan towards the escape pods, "Fucking hell, Kaidan! Go, now! This is an order!".

His legs obey the voice of command while his brain is still catching up and he's halfway to the pods, when, `Now wait just a minute...`, but Shepard has vanished in the smoke and Kaidan is alone. He fights against the urge to go after Shepard, serious eyes and orders be damned, knows how futile that would be, while he fights his way through drifting debris. Only two escape pods are left. 

Precious seconds tick by while he stands, unable to decide, it doesn't matter which he takes, he should leave, Shepard ordered him to. But he can't. Enters the right-hand pod, hovering anxiously in the entryway while explosions audibly close in, spelling the Normandy's demise one bang at a time.

Every second, every heartbeat seems to stretch into eternity. There is plenty of time to see the debris floating off into space, to see this system's sun cresting behind that nameless blue planet's horizon. There is so much beauty in space, despite or possibly because it being so deadly. Like Shepard, really. Space isn't black, it's blue, if viewed through a mass effect field. Blue like Shepard's eyes.

He can see their attacker and he spends a whole heartbeat studying the strange outline of their ship, looking as if it had been torn loose from a planet instead of being built. There is something organic about this bulky shape that doesn't quiet parse with its sinister looming above them. This is the ship that killed a legend, that may kill Kaidan, that may have killed them all, but he can't feel hate or remorse, not yet. This is too fresh, the knowledge is just in his brain, not yet in his heart.

Sudden movement, weightless things careening wildly, and Shepard emerges, dragging Joker by one arm. The pilot is barely conscious, the other arm hanging limp and at a sickly angle, obviously broken. Kaidan's heart leaps wildly and he turns from the sight of the attacking ship. In the corner of his eye he can see light blooming suddenly from that direction, a strangely warm, yellow beam cutting towards them. He wants to shout, tell Shepard to get the fuck over here, but suddenly they're out of time. 

A heartbeat. Time stops. 

Kaidan can actually see the moment Shepard makes his decision, piercing eyes behind that visor narrowing in calm calculation. He sees how every muscle in the commander's body tenses and then uncoils as he shoves Joker forcefully towards the left-hand escape pod, the one closer to him. Shepard turns, looking for the release panel and as he does so, his gaze sweeps across Kaidan, still in the entryway of his own pod.

Kaidan extends his hand and he thinks he's shouting something but he can't hear it over the maddening rush of blood in his ears. He feels riveted by those space-coloured eyes, speared to the core of his being. There are so many things he wants to tell Shepard, chief among them "Don't leave me behind!", which is strange, because Shepard is the one currently left behind, isn't he.

A lifetime later, Kaidan will desperately shout these words, with bloodstained lips, amidst a mad rush towards a beam of white light, in a ruined city, on a dying planet. His hand is and will be outstretched, now and then, stretched towards Shepard, always, through time and space. If he were to know the pain and anguish waiting for them, he still couldn't change a thing. He's powerless before Shepard's eyes. Always was, always will be.

A heartbeat. Time restarts.

Light fills Kaidan's vision with a boom as the Normandy is torn apart. He doesn't see how Shepard presses the release button, blinded by the light of destruction, but he feels the sharp pressure as the escape pod snaps shut. Looses his footing as it is ejected from a dying Normandy like a seed pod from a burning plant, desperate to continue its legacy.

There seems to be no transition between the two states. One heartbeat Kaidan is on the floor, dazed, ears ringing, almost blind, the next he's at the porthole, watching their ship break apart, caving in to the stress. His pod floats aimlessly, there's something wrong with the power unit, but he couldn't care less. Doesn't care that he's still way too close to the dying ship, that the explosions tearing her apart and the parts of her being forcefully hurled into space are a deadly danger to his little sphere of life.

His visor provides him with maximum state of the art augmentation of his view. He can see every explosion, every one of Normandy's last death throes. Can see seats and half a screen and even a toothbrush floating into space. Can see the attacker's ship elegantly swing away and speed off, their target destroyed, their deed done.

He can see in exquisite detail the armour-clad figure expelled from Normandy's death wound.

Shepard is still moving and hope springs eternal for one impossibly long heartbeat, but then Kaidan notices the jets of pressurized gas, freezing in space's deadly beauty, and he knows what this means, has run the simulations a hundred times, marine base training. Shepard's suit is compromised, his precious air escaping. He struggles. Jerks. It's painful to watch, and Kaidan forgets to breathe as he imagines how Shepard desperately tries to suck in air that isn't there, tries to claw his way back to life.

He swears he can see those blue eyes, staring in his direction. He will later swear to the crew, come hell or high water, that Shepard was still conscious, that the commander knew exactly what his situation was. That he deliberately stopped struggling against the inevitable. Accepting it. At peace.

Kaidan does not stop struggling. Will never accept this. Fuck peace. Shepard is dying.

Later, when they retrieve his pod, they will find him still rigidly upright. The porthole will be smeared with blood, as he has smashed first his gloves, then his fists by pounding against the impregnable glass.

Kaidan never notices. He only stares at that still figure in space that grows smaller and smaller as Shepard falls away from the wreck and towards a lovely but deadly world, through merciless beauty that kills, through a void that can never be bridged. Falling away from him.

The technicians will be baffled by the destruction inside of the pod. It's a wonder it survived at all. Kaidan will not be able nor willing to tell them how his biotics flared as he watched Shepard dying, flared beyond his control or anything he ever thought he'd be able to summon. Scorched every surface, melted anything not fireproof, as he tried to burn through the porthole, get outside, get to Shepard, no matter what.

The sun rises above the planet's horizon and bathes everything in a warm light, and a small glint of reflection on a far away visor, followed by the descending carcass of the Normandy herself, is the last thing he remembers seeing for a long time.

He won't have any voice left by the time he is rescued, though he will never be able to remember what he screamed or that he screamed at all. He will only remember trying desperately to say all the things he failed to say when Shepard was still within reach, not falling away from him, falling, forever.

He doesn't cry. Not when they rescue him, not when they gently break it to him that twenty of the crew died. That Commander Shepard is lost. As if he didn't know that. They shy away from his disdain, marking him as 'potentially mentally unstable' in their records.

He doesn't cry at the state funeral, beside the empty casket covered with the alliance flag. He is the only crew member, besides the turian and the krogan who are physically incapable of crying, who does not shed a tear. The media will pick up on this, it will cause speculation and rumours. Even the crew, those that did not know him so well, will wonder. Does he not care? Is Kaidan Alenko really so cold, so emotionless, that he won't even shed a tear for Commander Shepard, the hero, saviour of the citadel?

They don't know that he couldn't care less about the hero. That the saviour of the citadel means nothing to him. If he were to cry, he would cry for Shepard, no title, no honorific. But he cannot cry anymore. He's shed all of his tears in that escape pod and now his eyes are dry, bone dry, dry like the winds on Tuchanka, and not even this last little solace is possible for him.

Kaidan doesn't care what they think. Let them make assumptions. Composed, perfect, newly minted Staff Commander Alenko. The one that always keeps his head. The one that survived, first Virmire, then on the citadel, now Alchera. He only learns the name of that blue planet when they hand him a medal for it. A medal for his failure. What a joke.

He doesn't let them see how broken he is inside. Never contemplates anything else but picking up his duty once more, knowing it's what Shepard would expect of him, would want from and for him. He keeps it all inside, for Shepard. Always for Shepard, who is endlessly falling, even after all this time.

And again, he fails him.

Shepard would want the crew to stick together. To continue what he started. Would expect Kaidan to quit mourning after some amount of time, to get his ass in gear and start kicking ass again.

But Kaidan can't.

He watches Garrus, stiff and ramrod straight at the funeral, and all he can see is Shepard giving the turian a bruising but nonetheless friendly clap on the back, lighting the mood with a downright filthy joke.

He watches Liara, slumped over her workstation when she thinks nobody's there to witness it, crying, and all he can see is Shepard bending down, comforting her with his unique mix of charm and good-natured ribbing.

He watches Joker fall apart in so many ways on so many days, blaming himself, and all he can see is Shepard setting him straight, telling Joker that this 'isn't his damn fault', that there's nothing he could have done. And it takes all his strength to make himself believe that and not blame Joker himself, because that would be so easy, so convenient.

He looks at the picture of Ash and all he can see are Shepard's sorrowful, serious, blue eyes as he apologizes for not being able to save them both. 

It breaks him.

So he leaves it all behind, leaves all of them behind. Asks the alliance to give him a mission, any mission, doesn't care where or what, as long as it means work somewhere that isn't here.

He doesn't look for his former crew members on the extranet. Barely ever touches his omni-tool, unless he absolutely has to. Concentrates on the missions, trying hard not to notice how alliance command still seems weary about him and his mental state, giving him assignments that are a joke for someone of his experience and calibre. 

They say that time heals all wounds. He waits for that to happen every day, but his soul keeps bleeding from the seconds, the heartbeats, the eternities in that escape pod and on and on during every day, every waking hour. It's like a part of his soul, the one that contained compassion and joy and love of life, fell with Shepard, and maybe it's still falling, endlessly, forever falling towards the frozen surface of a blue planet, blue like the colour of Shepard's eyes.

 

Two years later, at one in the morning, on a ship bound towards a world called Horizon, his omni-tool beeps in a strange way. It's the alarm he set some years ago, the one that's supposed to alert him to news about Shepard. He's forgotten to get rid of it.

He groans sleepily, rubbing his eyes. Looks out of his cabin's porthole into the vastness of space, the blue energy of the mass effect field tinting space a colour he'll always associate with one man's eyes. Mutters under his breathe about the so-called merits of modern technology and threatens his omni-tool with colourful descriptions of technical destruction.

The message is from Anderson.

It takes Kaidan only a heartbeat to read it. He doesn't cry. There's no reason to.

Shepard has finally ceased falling.


End file.
